Jot Thought

My first night in Austin turned out well. On the flight from San Jose to Austin, a.k.a. the Nerd Bird, I met a couple interesting people. The man next to me was on his way to Austin for a Knife cutting contest. I’ve never heard of such a thing but he was quite serious about making and selling custom knives. He was ranked number 8 in the world and ran a small business selling knives at these events. Check out this video to see what he was talking about.

I then met Jon Pederson, the CEO of Pondry.com. We hit it off right away and spoke about his web development company. We’ve been thinking about creating an iPhone App for Outright.com and his company seems like a good fit. I gave him my business card and told him to give me a call if he wanted to grab some dinner and a beer later.

I ended up meeting up with Jon and his friend who lives in Austin. We had a couple Belgian beers and in general had a good “nerd” time. Austin is just how I remember it. This town has a lot of character and certainly has a fine selection of Micro and foreign beers.

SXSW officially kicks off tomorrow and I need to figure out what talks I’ll be going to. In general, looks like this is going to be a pretty good conference.

The past couple months we’ve been working on a contract for Intuit where we are using Perforce for our SCM. We needed to setup continuous integration but couldn’t find a fully functioning Perforce driver. With the help of Tom Hanely and Chris Bailey we successfully created a driver that works with Perforce and CruiseControl.rb. Check out the README file for instructions on getting started.

Besides updating the original driver to work with CruiseControl.rb 1.3, we also fully implemented all methods so that changesets and diffs will be accurate on the website and sent emails. Please let me know if you run into any errors or problems.

We are happy to announce that GoBootstrap.com is now open to the public. We have been receiving some good press over the past week. If you are a sole proprietorship and tired of using spreadsheets to track your income and expenses, sign up now.

We’ve been dabbling with Twitter lately and the verdict is still out in terms of it’s overall value.  There are definitely times when it seems like more of a distraction than a valuable tool.  There are also times when it’s just unavailable for long stretched.

But the other day, I came across a curiously powerful use for Twitter - better understanding customer needs, and especially, the language they use when expressing those needs.  I posted on our Paybackable blog about the specific example of where we foudn this useful, but the crux of it is that you can use a great little tool called Tweetscan to search the public timeline.  On a lark, I typed in “expense reports” and got a ton of posts (aka tweets) from everyday people complaining about doing expense reports.  I did it again this morning and the consistency in language is impressive.  You can check out my blog post about the insights this generated for us.  If you want to quickly see the results of the search, try it yourself.

No, this isn’t the most groundbreaking breakthrough in customer insight gathering, but still a nice little addition to the arsenal.

Well, it took us about a week longer than we thought, but we just released a major upgrade to Paybackable. There are 2 key elements to the release:

1. The ability to create company accounts and add employees
2. We added paid account plans

We also rolled out a new look and feel that was created by real designers, as opposed to Kevin hacking around.

So we’ll be giving DHH’s “advice” a whirl and trying to actually charge money for a useful web service.

If you know any small companies who want to simplify their online expense reporting, please send them our way

In case you haven’t seen these yet, compare the following two videos from StartupSchool ‘08: the first by Greg McAdoo at Sequoia and another by David Heinemeier Hansson of 37 Signals and Rails fame.

We found them both particularly interesting because we are currently wrestling with the decision of whether to try to go raise money for our company or continue bootstrapping it. We have two products in the market: Paybackable, which provides very simple online expense reporting and has a bunch of users and Bootstrap, which is in private alpha. We are close to releasing a major upgrade to Paybackable that will add support for company accounts and employees. The release will also introduce paid plans, much like 37Signals’ products. So we’re about to learn first-hand how difficult it will be to try the approach in David’s video.

For Bootstrap, it’s a much grander vision and frankly, we don’t know if we can afford to do it justice in a reasonable amount of time by funding it ourselves. Hence the interest in raising money. We’re gathering as much advice as possible and will begin getting feedback on our pitch very shortly. But it seems clear that once we head down this path, it’s go big and exit or bust.

So we’re at an interesting crossroad. Do we shoot for the stars? Or do we try to become a “lifestyle” company - to use a popular term in the private investing space. Right now, all we know is that there are some pretty important problems that we can solve for small business owners like ourselves. We’ll see what the future holds.

If you look up the IRS instructions for tracking business miles, you won’t find the word odometer. And yet most solutions in the market ask for starting and ending odometer readings to calculate mileage.

We wrote a post about a better way to calculate mileage over on our Paybackable blog, including how we’ve made it easier to do so from Paybackable itself.

Self employment is about to get easier…

We have officially moved into private alpha on Bootstrap, our first major homegrown application. We aren’t saying much about it at this point while select users are banging away on it. But we can say this - it will definitely increase the time an entrepreneur can spend growing a business, rather than dealing with the hassles of running it. It’s entirely web-based and will work on all the major browsers…:-)

If you would like to learn more about Bootstrap, go to our home page at www.gobootstrap.com and submit your email. We’ll keep you posted as we open access to more folks and unveil specific features.

Another interesting post, this time in the Wall Street Journal’s Independent Street blog, about using social networks to promote your business.

Several interesting comments from some business owners. While clearly in the early stages, I think this is going to be an interest way to how businesses will market their products going forward.

We just created a branded product page on Facebook, using their Page Manager application.‚ Check us out at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Esomnie-Software/9913611301.

One thing that struck me as being partifularly interesting is the potential use of Pages as a CRM (customer relationship management) tool. By inviting one’s customers to become “fans”, Facebook makes it drop dead simple to communicate with them, including opt-in inbox delivery of updates. Whether you’re a small business, an aspiring musician, or a large enterprise, it’s an interesting solution to‚ a traditionally thorny problem.

Kudos to whoever came up with this at Facebook - very clever.